The Google Home Max is down to $299 ($100 off) on the Google Store

The Google Home Max is Google’s biggest, loudest speaker. It’s really great, but it’s also really expensive at $399. If you’ve been waiting for a discount, today’s your day: the Max is $100 off on the Google Store, along with discounts on a handful of other Google goods.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what’s good with the Google Home Max, but to recap: it gets almost impractically loud and it sounds great, with clean highs and booming lows.

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The Google Home Max is down to $299 ($100 off) on the Google Store was written by the awesome team at Android [...]

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March 21, 2019

[Update: Nextbit Robin and other devices too] LineageOS 16 Pie adds support for 2016 Pixels, Xiaomi Mi 8, and more

Update 1: 2019/03/21 10:40am PDT
Five more devices have made the jump from LineageOS 15 to LineageOS 16, including the Nextbit Robin:

Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Plus Wi-Fi (YTX703F)
Lenovo Yoga Tab 3

After months of anticipation, the popular LineageOS custom ROM finally released a version based on Android 9 Pie last month. The project has already updated 30 devices to Pie, but now a few more have been added.

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[Update: Nextbit Robin and other devices too] LineageOS 16 Pie adds support for 2016 Pixels, Xiaomi Mi 8, and more was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

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March 21, 2019

Google makes ambitious promises about Stadia streaming speed, latency

Google’s Phil Harrison (you may remember him from his days at Sony).

SAN FRANCISCO—Google’s Phil Harrison tells Ars that Stadia game streaming should provide a smooth, full-resolution experience on Internet connections above a threshold of 20 to 30mbps, a level that should allow for “hundreds of millions of potential players in the markets that we’re talking about.”

While the company set a threshold of 25mbps for its beta testing late last year, Harrison told Ars that “in actual fact, we only use an average of 20mbps; it obviously bounces up and down depending on the scene.” Since that [...]

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March 21, 2019

Google is convinced it can get game streaming right

Phil Harrison won’t budge. As a vice president and general manager at Google, he’s spent the past 15 minutes explaining why Stadia, the company’s freshly announced game-streaming service, will actually work on the existing internet infrastructure acr…